The present invention relates to electronic music on hand portable and communication enabled devices and, more particularly, but not exclusively to electronic music on PDA and cellular type devices.
PDA and cellular devices with musical ability are available. Such devices have sound card capabilities that enable them to play high quality musical notes and they are able to play music files, for example ring tones, or allow a user to enter his own ringtone via the keyboard.
A major limitation with such electronic devices is the limited resources. Both permanent and temporary memory are severely limited as compared with desktop or laptop computers, and the musical ability must not interfere with the other activities of the device, for example its communication abilities. Thus an add-on feature such as music should not exceed resource requirements as follows: ROM should be limited to about 20 MB (including built-in content), and RAM usage should be limited to about 8 MB of dynamic RAM.
Another consideration is power consumption—sound hardware consumes a relatively large amount of battery power. Any sound hardware should be kept in a sleep mode whenever possible in order to conserve battery power. It is expected that a full battery could be emptied by about 1-2 hours of sound playback.
Due to these limitations, the utilization of the sound card has generally been limited. Users are able to play and set up ring tones but nothing much larger, and the ability to set ring tones allows the user nothing more than to play a set of tones. The communication ability of the cellular device is used solely to download such ringtone files.
In general a musical product is wanted that is simple for a beginner to use, but that also satisfies the requirements of the more sophisticated user. In this case the sophisticated user is a user with a good musical background, often one who can play a musical instrument or has a knowledge of musical theory. In particular the product should produce better results for the advanced user, and for the beginner should be expected to produce steadily better results the more the product is used.
There is thus the overall feeling that the full capabilities of the cellular device are not being fully utilized.